Marital conflict has bern shown to be an important predictor of child and adolescent emotional, behavioral, interpersonal, arid academic difficulties Yet even in divorced families, the presence of a cooperative parenting partnership significantly decreases Children's risk for negative outcomes. It seems likely that the well-documented influence of the marital relationship on child outcomes is at least partially an indirect relationship mediated by the parenting alliance. Despite much attention to the effects of marital adjustment and individual parenting on child outcomes, research on the coparenting relationship is limited, and few studies examine the parenting partnership before marital dissolution. The purpose of the proposed study is to explore the development of the parenting partnership as couples first become parents. A longitudinal study will be conducted with data collected during the third trimester of pregnancy, arid 1,3, and 6 months after the birth of the child. Self-report data on each spouse's perceptions of individual, contextual, and child characteristics, as well as observations of marital and coparenting interactions, will be obtained horn 100 couples recruited during pregnancy from doctors' offices, childbirth classes, and the Department of Public Health. Four questions will be addressed: 1) Is there evidence for the construct validity of the parenting partnership separate from the marital relationship; 2) How does the parenting partnership change over the initial monthd of parenthood, 3) What pre-birth characteristics predict individual differences in the development of the parenting alliance, 4) what is the inter-relationship between the parenting alliance and other variables that may change over time, such as the marital relationship, division of labor, parenting efficacy, and perception of the child's temperament? Confirmatory factor analysis and latent growth curve methods will be used to answer these questions.